Caledonian2 comments on Variable Question Fallacies - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2008 06:22AM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 05 March 2008 01:49:03PM 0 points [-]

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" has well-defined true-or-false answers. It's just that people are generally too stupid to understand what the no-answer actually indicates.

"Is this sentence false?" is problematic only if we presume that it's meaningful. All things are dividable into the categories of sensible and nonsensical. The sensible portion is then further dividable into the categories of true and false. Nonsense is outside the bounds of the true-false distinction.